A modeling and drawing team of three people on a large infrastructure project. They worked out of a shared ProjectWise environment, where workspace and configuration settings are pushed to everyone's machine so the whole project models and draws the same way.
As team lead, one member had been given elevated ProjectWise access. That's a normal setup: leads need it to manage their team's files. The access also allows changes at the configuration level, which affect everyone else on the project.
The team lead put in a long stretch on a set of drawings, working Thursday through Sunday. On Monday they flagged a problem: the grids were missing.
Grids set out the building. Every model and every drawing on the project references them, so when they move, everything built off them is wrong. Nothing looked like a mistake. As far as the lead knew, they had only been working in their own files.
A BIM Global consultant spent the day tracing it. It wasn't a corrupted file or a software bug. While working inside a file in OpenBuildings, the lead had edited the project grids. Admin access makes that possible from inside the file, and changing a single value can move a grid to a completely different place.
Grids are defined at the configuration level, so the edit didn't stay in one file. It changed the grid for the entire project. The lead hadn't done anything reckless. They had never been taught the difference between a change that affects your own file and one that affects everyone's.
Once the configuration-level edit was identified, the team could stop guessing and start backtracking: realigning the affected work to the correct project grid instead of chasing missing elements file by file.
The edit took seconds. The cost fell on everyone who depended on that grid. Configuration-level mistakes don't stay with the person who makes them, so a team pays for an untrained lead many times over.
That's why BIM Global training goes beyond which button does what. It covers how the tools relate to each other: which changes stay in your file and which ripple across the project. The more people share a configuration, the more that understanding is worth.